How the Greek cellphone network was tapped.

[Leichter, Jerry]

| > Crypto has been an IP minefield for some years.  With the expiry of
| > certain patents, and the availability of other unencumbered crypto
| > primitives (eg. AES), we may see this change.  But John's other
| > points are well made, and still valid.  Downloadable MP3 ring tones
| > are a selling point.  E2E security isn't (although I've got to
| > wonder about certain teenage demographics... :)
| 
| It's also an open question whether network operators subject to
| interception requirements can legally offer built-in E2E encryption
| capabilities without backdoors.
It's going to be interesting to see the effect of the iPhone in this
area.  While nominally a closed system like all the handsets that
preceded it, in practice it's clear that people will find ways to load
their own code into the things.  (As of yesterday - less than two weeks
after the units shipped - people have already teased out how to get to
the debugging/code patching interface and have extracted the internal
passwords.  The community doing this would make a fascinating study in
and of itself - an international group coordinating through an open IM
line, tossing around ideas.)  There's plenty of CPU power available, and
a fairly standard environment.  (In fact, recent reports hint that the
chip contains a hardware accelerator for Java.)

Between encrypted VOIP over WIFI and eventually over broadband cell -
keeping people from running voice over their broadband connections is a
battle the telco's can't win in the long run - and just plain encrypted
cell phone calls, I think in a couple of years anyone who wants secure
phone connections will have them.  There will be tons of moaning about
it from governments - not to mention the telco's, though for them that
will be a triviality compared to all the other things they will lose
control over - but no one is going to be able to put this genie back
in the bottle.

Also, right now, the technology to build a cell phone is still
specialized and capital-intensive.  But today's leading-edge chip and
manufacturing technology is tomorrow's commodity.  Ten, twenty years
from now, anyone will be able to put together the equivalent of today's
iPhone, just as anyone can go down to Fry's today and build themselves
what was a high-end PC a couple of years ago.  You can't quite build
your own laptop yet, but can that be far off?  A "gray box" cellphone
might not compete with what you'll be able to buy from the leading-edge
guys of the day, but it will be easily capable of what's needed to do
secure calling.

So - who's going to write the first RFC for secure voice over cell, thus
circumventing the entire government/telco/PTT standards process?  We're
not quite ready for it to take off, but we're getting close.

							-- Jerry

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